Between the Bytes

Maligning Business-IT Alignment ByVal Souza

If you proudly proclaimed at last night’s CIO gathering that you'd managed to get your IT operation "closely aligned with the business," you probably got nods of approval from your peers, and even envious looks of admiration from the wannabes.

But that was yesterday. Today, you'd more likely be met with frowns instead. In two separate panel discussions that I moderated recently, one common thread that emerged was that denoting "alignment of IT with the business" as the prime objective of the CIO and the IT department is being looked down upon as an unmitigated insult these days.

In the first discussion that focused on enhancing IT agility, the CIO panelists smugly averred that business-IT alignment was pretty much a given in their organizations. One panelist patiently explained that his IT team has been routinely sitting down with the business heads since over a dozen years, understanding their needs and strategies, and simultaneously analyzing technology trends and advancements, before deciding on the appropriate IT solutions or strategy to deploy.

The second panel, which had global CIOs deliberating on the evolving role of the CIO, was more direct in its condemnation of the contention of business-IT alignment and attacked this peccant precept from myriad angles.

Firstly, business-IT alignment kind of implies that the IT department and the business are in fact separate entities or organizations. It would be preposterous to think in a similar way of finance or marketing or even the CEO’s office, so why then does this enigmatic epithet come to mind with respect to IT alone?

Further, the term itself is fuzzy and unmeasurable. There have been studies, models and white papers on what business-IT alignment involves and how it can be achieved. But in essence, if anything, all this has resulted in is accentuating the positioning of the IT department as a cost centre rather than as an entity that has the capability of unlocking the untapped potential within the organization while simultaneously enabling the exploitation of ever-new opportunities thrown up by changes in the marketplace and advances in technology.

With all the talk about alignment, the gap between IT and the rest of the organization is as wide as ever before in many organizations—keeping essentials like agility and collaboration messy and unmanageable at best, and a distant pipe dream at worst.

Peter Hinssen, author of the thought-provoking and unconventional book Business/IT Fusion (and panelist on the second panel I alluded to earlier), is unequivocal in his criticism of the entire business-IT alignment imbroglio. He’s rooting for “Fusion” instead, and not just as a new word for “Alignment”.

Hinssen writes: “Where Alignment implicitly calls for a two-party system to collaborate, Fusion is about a strong convergence between the two. Fusion means blending IT into the business. No longer treating IT as a supplier but completely integrating IT into the business… Instead of treating IT as a ‘staff function’ Fusion puts IT into the business, fully including it in strategy and operations.”

Amidst attention-grabbing statements by self-styled experts proclaiming the death of the CIO, or questioning whether the role merits a C-level title at all—statements that seem to be made with increasing frequency in these recessionary times—Hinssen makes a strong case for IT as well as the CIO being more important than ever before.

But even Hinssen is of the opinion that a large measure of reinvention is called for. He contends that the new CIOs need to cleverly bridge the gap between business and technology, be preoccupied with business issues and business impact, and diplomatically convince their business colleagues to use technology more efficiently and effectively. “CIOs must become a group of people who can use technology to help their organizations excel and achieve results, instead of breeding expensive systems that slow organizations down and cause friction,” states Hinssen.

And what of IT itself? Hinssen wants that to be flipped around and transformed into TI. That’s “technology-enabled innovation”. A world in which the focus is not on the cost of IT, but its value. Maybe, Service Oriented Architecture will provide some of the answers someday soon. But SOA or otherwise, as Hinssen concludes, “Transforming the IT factory is the only viable alternative if we want to create a competitive advantage through technology and become a true enabler for business growth and innovation.”
Are you up to it? Or more aptly, are you up to TI?

valsouza at ubmindia dot com